Mini-shootout: $900 smartphone vs. $3,000 DSLR, round three

The smartphone-vs-DSLR shootout has become something of a tradition here at the Ars Orbiting HQ. We did one in 2014 and another in 2015,
relying on my own (small) skills as a photographer to stage and shoot a
bunch of different images using both the latest model iPhone and my
Canon 5D Mark III DSLR.

For the past two years, we’ve had essentially
the same two takeaways: first, that smartphones take pretty
solid pictures when the lighting is good; second, I am a crap
photographer and we need to hire someone who knows how to compose a
scene if we’re going to keep doing these.

Well, good news, everyone: this time around, for this shootout, we got together with Houston-area pro photographer Jay Lee. This
partnership has resulted in some excellent images without any of the
casual mistakes my shots exhibited in past comparisons. (If Jay’s name
sounds familiar, it’s because he gained some Internet fame a few years
ago when Slashdot featured his efforts to fight a paranoid conspiracy theorist illegally using his photos.)

We also tried hard to find interesting
environments to shoot and wound up at some neat places—inside NASA’s
Apollo mission control center, deep underground in a forgotten cistern,
and behind the scenes at a local network TV station control room. The
idea was to gather shots in several distinct environments: very low
light, normal low indoor light, and bright outdoor sun. We also
constructed a few shots specifically to show off the iPhone 7 Plus’
dual-camera “zoom” feature, along with its software-based background
blur bokeh function.

A note on goals

The idea, as with past tests, was to shoot the
same scenes with both a smartphone and a DSLR and then compare the
quality of the output. As with all past tests, the DSLRs tend to come
out on top—but the thing we’re really looking at is how close the
smartphone comes to equaling the DSLR. And, as with past tests, there
are a number of areas where the smartphone looks pretty damn good.

Nobody—except possibly Apple’s marketing
department—claims that smartphones are better than DSLRs. However,
phones long ago left “good enough” territory; images produced by a
modern smartphone like the iPhone 7 Plus or Google Pixel can be flat-out
excellent when the images are constructed to play to the smartphones’
strengths. Conversely, throwing money at a DSLR and lenses and
speedlights won’t automatically mean you produce amazing images—the
picture-taker’s ability to compose the shot is still overwhelmingly
important.

The gear

For this roundup, we went with Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus as our representative smartphone and a pair of Sony Alpha bodies (an A7S and an A99V) for our DSLR exemplars.

“But Lee,” you ask, “why an iPhone 7 Plus instead of a Google Pixel phone? The Pixel has the best smartphone camera on the planet!”

Great question! The iPhone 7 Plus was our first pick for this particular piece because of two things. First, its fancy double-camera arrangement,
which includes both a “standard” lens and sensor and a second
“telephoto” lens and sensor. The “telephoto” lens and sensor give the
phone an advantage over other smartphones when shooting zoomed images,
since most other smartphones use digital zoom instead of optical.

Second, because it does something interesting
with its two cameras in an attempt to mimic DSLR results. Both images
can be combined in software to produce a portrait-style image—a sharp
foreground and a pleasingly blurred background.
This kind of image is easy to produce on a standalone interchangeable
lens-type camera, where you can compose a shot with a shallow depth of
field, but considerably more difficult to do with a smartphone. Apple’s
solution uses software to fake the blur, and we wanted to see exactly
how well it works (spoiler: it’s alright but noticeably less good than
the real thing).

Still, the Pixel's camera looks intriguing,
and now that the Pixel is widely available—which it wasn't when we took
these shots a few months back—we will include it in our next roundup,
coming in the first half of 2017.

For each of the shoots below, we tried to
match the composition as closely as we could between the iPhone and the
DSLR. I had Jay shoot in RAW on all devices and asked him to
post-process all the images—iPhone and DSLR both—as he would if he were
going to use the photos professionally. The gallery thumbnails below
have been further resized and scaled for Web display, but the original
full-size images are available if you click through each image. (For
reference, Jay used DxO OpticsPro for post-processing—I am also a fan of DxO and have been using it instead of Lightroom for about a year now.)

Scenario 1: Very low light

Our first shoot took us to Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern,
an abandoned underground drinking water reservoir near downtown Houston
that has been renovated and repurposed as a quiet tourist destination.
Visitors enter the cistern through a newly constructed public entrance
that meanders a bit to give eyes a chance to adjust from sunlight to
dimness; the path opens onto a narrow, inclined ledge that rings the
chamber.

The cistern is fully enclosed and dark, with
light coming from red exit signs and dim orange overhead bulbs. The
ledge that circles the space has been reinforced and made safe for the
public, but it’s still a fascinatingly creepy vault. Concrete columns
rise through the center of the space that was once filled with water;
sounds echo for almost thirty seconds. A few people murmuring produces
an oddly unsettling aural effect, as if a vast multitude was conversing
just behind the rough concrete walls.

iPhone 7 Plus back camera (3.99mm, f/1.8), 1/15
second at f/2.8, ISO 1600. The dimness of the cistern proved difficult
for the iPhone to deal with, and we had some trouble setting up a timer
shot with the RAW app we were using.

Sony SLT-A99V with 16-35mm F2.8 ZA SSM lens @
30mm, 30 seconds at f/3.5, ISO 100. The A99V fared much better, since we
could easily set up a long exposure shot for it to drink in all the
available light.

iPhone 7 Plus back camera (3.99mm, f/1.8), 1/15
second at f/1.8, ISO 1600. The phone tries its best, but without a
3rd-party app to allow long exposures, this isn't the right place to use
an iPhone.

Scenario 2: Normal indoor light

We could shoot indoors anywhere, but with the
Johnson Space Center just a few minutes away, why not feature someplace
worth seeing? JSC’s Public Affairs Office was happy to let us use the
restored Apollo Mission Operations Control Room #2 (MOCR 2) on the third
floor of Building 30 to take some indoor shots.

This wasn’t our first time in MOCR 2—we've written extensively about Apollo Mission Control in this piece a few years ago,
where Apollo flight controller Sy Liebergot gave us the skinny on
exactly how Mission Control functioned and what each flight controller’s
console was used for. The room was then, and remains now, almost a holy
place, quiet as a church, and the carpeted raised-floor tiles bear the
coffee stains of five decades of human space flight. The sage green Ford
Philco consoles are vividly iconic, looking simultaneously futuristic
and almost laughably antiquated.

Most of the consoles at this point sport a mix
of Shuttle- and Apollo-era control panels, and none are in an original
flight configuration (which varied from mission to mission anyway).
Still, the knobs and buttons proved as irresistible as ever; while Jay
tirelessly set up and shot pictures, I chatted with our PAO
representative and idly toggled switches on and off. The buttons are
heavy and chunky, requiring several pounds of pressure to depress, and
they all make the same metallic “CHUNK” when engaged.

iPhone 7 Plus back camera (3.99mm, f/1.8), 1/20
sec at f/1.8, ISO 200. Standing at the rear corner of MOCR2. It's dim,
but not overly so; the iPhone picks up the room without problems.

iPhone 7 Plus back camera (3.99mm, f/1.8), 1/13
sec at f/1.8, ISO 100. A close-up of CONTROL, one of the Lunar
Module-specific stations. The tiny iPhone lens doesn't really do a
depth-of-field blur, so the background remains in focus.

Sony ILCE-7S with 16-35mm F2.8 ZA SSM @ 16mm,
1/160 sec at f/4, ISO 1600. Plenty of light to work with, so aside from
the different framing from the lens, the pictures are pretty close. The
DSLR has perhaps a bit less noise.

Sony SLT-A99V with 16-35mm F2.8 ZA SSM @ 22mm,
1/100 sec at f/11, ISO 100. The DSLR also benefits here with a wider
field of view with this lens, presenting the building in a more
traditional portrait style.

Scenario 4: Zoom and portrait bokeh

The last set of images compares the zoom and
portrait mode functionality of the iPhone with that of a DSLR. The big
takeaway here is that the DSLR, with its multitude of lenses and fine
control over settings, provides a tremendous amount of flexibility in
framing and shooting portraits. Tight manual control over the depth of
field coupled with a large lens means you can choose to zoom on objects
and still shoot them with a blurred or unblurred background, depending
on how you set your F-stop, whereas the iPhone has to use software
trickery and produces a much less pleasing blur. The images from
iPhone’s zoom lens are also not super great—though they are
unquestionably superior to the digital zooms of the past.

iPhone 7 Plus back zoom camera (6.6mm, f/2.8),
1/60 sec at f/2.8, ISO 500. This first attempt at a portrait led to a
noisy foreground. The background is appropriately blurred, but the image
doesn't look that great.

The art of good enough

This year’s shootout comes to essentially the
same conclusion as the last: a high-end smartphone camera can under many
circumstances produce images that are as good as a DSLR’s images. But
“many circumstances” doesn’t mean “all the time,” and if you’re going
somewhere specifically to take pictures, you’ll still want a
high-quality standalone camera.

On the other hand, state-of-the-art smartphone
cameras have for years now been good enough to use for basically
everything, and the iPhone has the advantage of being on you all the
time. The best camera, as they say, is the one you have with you, and an
Internet-connected smartphone remains the easiest way for just about
anyone to take a picture of a thing and then share that thing with the
world.